I have more than one Gentoo machine and tried in the past not to load the same files 2 times. To spare bandwidth, time and/or avoid surcharging the servers, depending on my different ADSL contracts. Sometimes a little exaggerating.

It is probably me, who did not look very good, didn't understand it very well.
But as I now understand it, I can use rsync not only for emerge --sync, but also for emerge -f -uD world. So if you set it up for the portage tree, not also setting it up for the distfiles?

I done things in the past with NFS and with FTP. It gave always some problems with my iptables settings and gave some complexity.

I suppose sharing some directory's over the network is a very good solution Sharing Portage over NFS, (Under Ubuntu, linking a few directory's to the distribution on an other partition works also very well, I noticed. As using chroot to get everything updated from one script.), but using rsync also for distfiles when you did already set it up for the portage tree, seems me an easy and fast alternative.

Emerge seems to accept rsync in the mirror variable. Only a few files will still get searched on some third party servers on the internet. If the internet was closed at the moment of the emerge, a script can identify them from Portage's output and could try to get them from an other internal machine, but that starts to be complex. Also because the machines are not completely identical and the second needs some files from the internet for packages not installed on the first machine.

I had a problem with it rsync because my distfiles are links to an other folder structure.

I did until now not succeed in setting all the options in make.conf so that it all is checked in one pass without timeouts trying to access sites not mentioned in the mirror variable. (With the network down the first time it goes faster.)

I run a Gentoo rsync server for my home network. It syncs once a day and my other systems sync to it instead of the outside world.
For distfiles mirroring, I use http-replicator, which is a a caching proxy for distfiles. The first fetch goes to the outside world, subsequent fetches of the same file are served from cache._________________Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

Same here, main home NAS is the main sync box and then my other gentoo boxes have SYNC="rsync://192.168.0.2/gentoo-portage" in make.conf on the other boxes_________________The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter
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